What caught our eye this week was growth in capital expenditures. So far this quarter, overall growth in capex spending is up 58.6 percent. 

That number sounds impressive at first, but it includes capex spending from the four AI hyperscalers — Alphabet ($GOOG), Amazon ($AMZN), Meta ($META), and Microsoft ($MSFT) — which all reported their Q3 earnings this week. 

Those four firms alone spent a stunning $201.9 billion on capex. That is more than half of all capex spending (54.4 percent, to be precise) for our entire sample of 770-ish firms. It is also more than double the $97.3 billion those four firms spent one year ago.

If we strip out the four hyperscalers from our analysis, capex spending for all other firms rose only 23.6 percent, from $136.6 billion one year ago to $168.9 billion this quarter. That’s not nothing, but it’s also nowhere near the 58.6 percent overall number we see in Figure 1, above. 

The four AI hyperscalers are behaving like a black hole in the capex universe, whose gravity is strong enough to distort the capex picture for all other firms. 

Oddly enough, we see the opposite effect in the net income line. The four hyperscalers saw Q3 net income go from $86.6 billion one year ago to $93.6 billion this quarter. That’s an increase of only 8.1 percent. All other firms saw net income grow an impressive 38.9 percent (from $231.2 billion to $321.1 billion). 

Add the two groups together, and the tepid net income growth of the hyperscalers pulls down overall net income growth for all to that 30.5 percent number we see in Figure 1.

We’ll have more analysis of the hyperscalers next week. Meanwhile, Figure 2, below, shows our Earnings Tracker data in table format. 

Calcbench tracks these earnings using our Earnings Tracker template, which pulls in financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Earnings Tracker provides an up-to-the minute snapshot of financial performance compared to the year-earlier period.

If Calcbench subscribers wish to get their hands on the template we use for this analysis, so you can conduct your own experiments at home, use this link to the file. 

Please note that it will only work with an active Calcbench subscription. If you need an active subscription (and who doesn’t, really, when swift access to real-time data is so important?), contact us at us@calcbench.com.

That’s all for this week. Come back next Friday for more!